“The Joy of Doing What I Love Most”

Esther Atkins knows that her chances of winning the Boston Marathon in April are slim. She’s sharing the starting line with the defending champion, Atsede Baysa of Ethiopia, and two of America’s best marathoners, Olympians Shalane Flanagan and Desiree Linden.

Flanagan’s PR is 2:21:14. Linden’s is 2:22:38.

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Atkins’s PR is 2:33:15.

In other words, she is an elite athlete several steps behind the highest echelon. But she’s not fazed by her speedier competition.

“I used to focus on that gap between our times,” says Atkins, 30. “Shalane has run 12 minutes faster than my PR, so I don’t really see us in the same realm right now, and I don’t feel any kind of inferiority complex.”

Instead, Atkins has to find ways to achieve success that have nothing to do with breaking the tape. And in that area, she’s perhaps the most outstanding marathoner of all.

Playing to the crowd At most of her races, she enjoys as much crowd support as the leaders because, she says, “I ask for it”—by engaging spectators with waves, gestures, and a smile that persists when she’s charging along at sub-6:00 pace.

A former soprano in a professional choir, Atkins, who lives and trains in Greenville, South Carolina, views marathons as opportunities to perform. And she considers herself an ambassador for the sport as well as a competitor.

When she was running the marathon in Beijing at the 2015 world championships, she waved the whole time at the Chinese crowds that were much quieter than raucous American ones. “I felt like I needed to show them that they could cheer,” she says.

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At the New York City Marathon last November, Atkins went full on with the heart signs and roof-raises over the last few miles. She concedes she may have overdone it—she thought she was rolling to a top-10 finish when she was in fact was in 11th place. But she believes that appealing to crowds for support helps her physically as well as psychologically.

On her Instagram account after the race, Atkins posted a picture of her smiling. “The joy of doing what I love most,” she captioned it.

Acing the pacing Another way Atkins finds success is in her pitch-perfect pacing. She has run negative splits at six of her last seven marathons, including in New York on a windy day. Her second-half split of 1:18:13 was faster than that of six of the women who finished ahead of her. (Atkins finished in 2:37:11.)

“I think it is a gift that I have that I’m able to sense just how fast I can run 26.2 miles given the conditions,” she says. “I wanted to run a PR in New York, but the weather was not ideal. I adjusted my pace 10 seconds per mile slower. So my time wasn’t that great, but I did a really awesome job of gauging my effort given the headwind.”

She has fond memories of her only Boston Marathon, in 2014, when she notched her PR. In that race, unbroken by the course’s tough second-half hills, she ran an 83-second negative split after breaking away from a pack of competitors at the midway mark.

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The power of visualization In big marathons, where the elite pack gets strung out, Atkins has a unique strategy for dealing with running alone: imagining she’s in the lead.

“I was completely alone at that point, and there was nobody in sight until the last three miles, but I felt like I was winning my own race,” says Atkins of her 19th-place finish in Boston that year. “And that’s how I suggest that anybody should run, is to imagine that you’re winning.”

None of these tactics are to suggest that Atkins isn’t competitive about her time and place goals; she is. When she lines up in Boston, she wants to get close to 2:30 and run a time fast enough to earn her selection for the U.S. team going to the world championships in London this summer. And someday she wants to win another national title, as she did in 2014 when she won the U.S. marathon championships with a come-from-behind victory at the Twin Cities Marathon.

The memory of that triumph inspires her in her daily training. “It definitely still matters to me, and I want to get another one,” she says.

Getting out the door On days when Atkins’s motivation flags, she’ll arrange a running phone date with a friend, using the easy miles as a chance to catch up. Or she scans through her extensive podcast library, and tells herself she can’t listen to whichever episode she’s dying to hear until her running shoes hit the pavement. Or she reminds herself she’d feel worse if she didn’t run.

Sometimes for her second run of the day she’ll bring Grace, a border collie mix who was a present after the Olympic Marathon Trials, where she also was 11th. Grace enjoys running as much as Atkins: the dog once accompanied her human on an 18-mile run and averaged 7:30 pace.

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Esther Atkins and her dog, Grace, cover many miles together.

Cole Atkins

But Atkins doesn’t usually have trouble getting out to train. Her motivation derives from her concrete goals and those aspirations that are harder to define, like inspiring spectators. For Atkins, maximizing her athletic potential and showing her enthusiasm for running are complementary pursuits.

“Part of my mission is to show people how much fun you can have even if you are very ambitious and competitive,” she says. “It still can be fun even if you’re working really, really hard.”

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